"After the Six-Day War — in which the USSR was Egypt’s primary weapons supplier — the Soviet Union began to export its version of anti-Zionism with new vigor. The field of “Zionology” — essentially antisemitism under a patina of pseudo-academic language — was the primary incubator of this propaganda. In 1972, the Communist Party’s Central Committee issued a directive “on further measures to fight anti-Soviet and anti-communist activities of international Zionism.” Soon after, the Soviet Academy of Sciences began to study anti-Zionism in the classic Marxist style of presenting ideological projects as scholarly. A common thread in the Zionologists’ output was the idea that Zionism is inherently evil; the Great Soviet Encyclopedia listed its pillars as “militant chauvinism, racism, anticommunism, and anti-Sovietism,” and accused “international Zionism” of “serving as the front squad of colonialism and neo-colonialism.”

It is worth drawing a distinction between this kind of antisemitism and the varieties that had come before. The medieval Christian hatred of Jews as “Christ-killers” did not have much purchase in Communist Russia, with its state-enforced atheism. But there is a contrast as well between the USSR and Nazi Germany. Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, wrote in a 2019 Tablet essay that Soviet leaders adapted old antisemitic tropes “to the Marxist framework by substituting the idea of a global anti-Soviet Zionist conspiracy for a specifically Jewish one. Jewish power became Zionist power. The rich and conniving Jewish bankers controlling money, politicians, and the media became the rich and conniving Zionists. The Jew as the Antichrist became the Jew as the anti-Soviet.”

This characterization of Zionism fit nicely into a broader anti-Western project to portray the U.S.-led order as oppressive and colonialist, a notion that would in turn help birth the idea of a distinct Palestinian national identity. Petrovsky-Shtern explains: “There was no concept of a Palestinian qua national identity before 1967, and all of that, I believe, is the product of Soviet propaganda after 1967. In the political discourse from the late 19th century to that time, the word ‘Palestinian’ is used to describe one group: Jews in the land of Israel. If you talked about ‘Palestinians,’ you were talking about Jewish kibbutzniks.”

Petrovsky-Shtern also says that the Soviet Union promoted the idea of Palestinian nationality by establishing nominal educational academies. For instance, it “created the Patrice Lumumba University, where representatives of future African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern elites were trained . . . along the lines of Soviet ideology — anti-American, anti-capitalist, and of course anti-bourgeois.” This was all done “under the banner of national liberation.” Directed toward Israel, the ideology denied the Jewish state’s very right to exist."

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/01/anti-zionisms-soviet-roots/